


(You’re) Sodium Fine

by zigostia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bad Pick-Up Lines, Crack, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 19:05:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18555922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zigostia/pseuds/zigostia
Summary: Lestrade had half a mind to laugh while the other half was rewinding through their goose chase of a case and trying to remember if, at any circumstance, Sherlock had accidentally been doused and pumped full of nitric oxide.





	(You’re) Sodium Fine

Lestrade had had one hell of a day. Not including the toe stub on the interrogation chair (significantly lowering his intimidation points), the coffee spill on his one good shirt (blue-and-white pinstriped, classy), and the fact that Sherlock had been right, once again (bastard; he had one hell of a longing to throw him in the lake to see if he floated), the aforementioned Sherlock was now looking at him with one of the smugest looks in the planes of existence.

Lazily sprawled across the bench, Sherlock raised an eyebrow. Lestrade gritted his teeth and tried to calm himself down by thinking of a nice, relaxing movie when he got home. With popcorn and snacks.

“It wasn’t him,” Lestrade squeezed out, painful as thick mashed potatoes through a ricer.

“Mmhm,” Sherlock said. “Now, shall we go talk to his fiancee, like I suggested in the first place?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lestrade muttered. He collected the batters of his pride and thrust it to the front of his mind before opening the door.

“You’re cleared, mate,” he told the man across the table. “Sorry about all that.”

When the man shuffled out the door, guided by Lestrade, Sherlock trailed behind the two of them all the way until they had reached the entrance to the police station. Then, he suddenly reached out a hand and tapped the man on the shoulder.

“I told you,” the man said with a scowl, turning, “it wasn’t me.”

To which Sherlock responded, “You’re still a thief, because you stole my heart.”

…

…

What.

The Fuck.

Lestrade had half a mind to laugh while the other half was rewinding through their goose chase of a case and trying to remember if, at any circumstance, Sherlock had accidentally been doused and pumped full of nitric oxide.

“What?” the cleared convict said.

Sherlock made an impatient face. “You stole my heart,” he said, “like a thief steals other objects. Metaphorically, of course, unless you were a serial killer with a fascination for body organs.”

“What?” the man said again.

“What?” Lestrade echoed.

Sherlock rolled his eyes, casting a exasperated look up to the ceiling that at this point served as a comfort after what the fuck had just happened. The sight of this familiarity jolted enough courage back into Lestrade to get some more words out.

“You good?” he wheezed out to Sherlock, hoping beyond hope that he had hallucinated the past five seconds.

Sherlock tilted his head at him for a moment, then said, “Better now that you’re here with me.” And then he winked.

Not hallucinating, then. Lestrade made a hysterical, guttural sound, tamping down an uncontrollable urge to hurl. Those words and Sherlock Holmes should never be paired together. Add a wink and it was the cherry on top. The universe was collapsing. The planes of reality were folding, ripping at the seams.

“Are you on drugs?” he asked, peering into Sherlock’s inexplicable blue-grey eyes. Pupils looked normal. Goddamn. Maybe it was Lestrade who had unknowingly been drugged.

“Just serotonin,” Sherlock responded, and for the love of all that was holy someone get him a bucket.

“You’re good to go,” Lestrade told the other man, and then he grabbed Sherlock’s arm and began to stomp towards the parking lot.

“What are you doing?” Sherlock asked.

Keeping a hand like a vise around Sherlock’s arm, Lestrade dug the other hand in his pocket for his keys. “I swear to fucking god, Sherlock, if you’re using again, I will tell John and he will end you.”

“I’m not on drugs!” Sherlock said, sounding utterly and completely affronted.

“Tell that to the piss cup,” Lestrade said, and shoved Sherlock into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

-+-+-+-

Molly was just about to lock up, looking forwards to a long night of cuddling with her cats and rewatching Netflix movies, when the door slammed open and Lestrade marched in, dragging a reluctant-looking Sherlock by the arm in a way that seemed like he had taken him by the ear instead.

“Oh, thank God you’re still here,” Lestrade said, sounding utterly relieved. “Listen, I think Sherlock’s using again.”

Sherlock groaned, flicked Lestrade’s grip off of his arm, and turned to Molly. “I’m _not,”_ he said, and then paused. “Unless you count high serotonin levels.” And then he winked.

In Molly opinion, Lestrade’s reaction to this was highly alarming, because he didn’t immediately pull out his gun and shoot this Sherlock Holmes imposter. Instead, he just sighed.

“Mate, don’t reuse lines,” Lestrade said. “That’s cheap.”

Sherlock turned a look on Lestrade and sniffed with disdain.

Molly said, very faintly, “What?”

Sherlock turned back to Molly and gave her a winning smile. “Nothing,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Sherlock was, as it turned out, not on drugs after all.

“Told you,” he said, minutes later, with that smug look that more than often found its way on his face one way or another about a dozen times a day. Lestrade looked up at the ceiling in an imploring, despairing air, grabbed Sherlock’s arm, and marched them out the doors. Molly wondered if she had accidentally taken something with her coffee this morning.

“Wait!” Sherlock said, right as they were about to exit. “Molly!”

Molly turned.

Sherlock said, “If you were an enzyme, I’d be DNA helices so that I could unzip your genes.”

Molly’s brain froze, then threw up its hands, flipped her the bird, and quit. She blinked, and blinked some more, and said, “Um.”

Sherlock tightened his lips impatiently. “Do you get it? Because DNA helices are enzymes that remodel nucleic acid and proteins, splitting the double helix into single strands so that they can be copied in cellular reproduction.”

“Um,” Molly said.

Lestrade said, “Are you absolutely _sure_ he’s clean?”

“I can be dirty,” Sherlock said, and Lestrade made a retching noise.

“Right, time to leave,” Lestrade said. “So sorry about this, Molly!” he shouted, his voice echoing in the corridor.

Molly stared after them for a long time. Then, she sighed, shook her head with a quick flick, and continued packing up. That Netflix show was sounding really good all of a sudden.

-+-+-+-

Anderson, for once, was having a good day. Sherlock had locked on to Lestrade today for his daily nagging, pestering, scoffing, and general put-downing, and the two of them had whisked off somewhere to bring in and question a suspect whom Sherlock swore up and down was not their man. If he were to be totally honest, Anderson had an inkling that Sherlock was right. He usually was. You wouldn’t get him to say that out loud with a gun to his head, though.

And Sherlock _had_ been right―he’d seen the man walk out the station a while ago through his window, which he used often for people-watching and the sorts, a preferred pastime of his for long, dreary hours. Contrary to popular opinion, most of Scotland Yard spent their shifts making water-cooler gossip and betting on when John and Sherlock would finally get their shit together and kiss already. The running-after-serial-killers, interrogating murderers, and breaking and entering? That was just Sherlock. And he wasn’t even an actual police.

Speak of the devil, he thought, when he saw the familiar car of Lestrade enter the parking lot and the two of them come out of it. He sipped his coffee that had gone cold by now and grimaced at the temperature while rolling his desk chair up to the window, watching them idly. Lestrade seemed to be angry about something, pinching his thumb and forefinger against that spot on his forehead the way he always did when he was upset. Sometimes on particularly long days, there would be a bruise on that spot by the end of the day.

He heard the door to the station open, and then two pairs of footsteps rapidly approaching his office. Shit. He swivelled back to his desk quickly and opened his computer, furiously trying to aim the mouse cursor at the ‘x’ on the top right of his window, where he had been playing Solitaire for the past two hours.

Right as he managed to shut down the window, there came a knock on the door.

“Come in!” Anderson called out, trying to sound casual.

Lestrade entered swiftly, Sherlock following.

“Hey, Lestrade,” Anderson said, pointedly ignoring Sherlock. He’d learned that it was easier to pretend Sherlock wasn’t there instead of trying to make small talk and/or insults that only resulted in scathing replies. “Is there a problem?”

Lestrade glanced back and forth from Anderson to, inexplicably, Sherlock. Sherlock had something that looked like a pained expression on his face. Anderson watched this for a moment and then turned his palms over in a ‘What?’ gesture.

Lestrade made a rolling motion with his hand, directed towards Sherlock. “You aren’t gonna…?” His tone was prompting.

Sherlock didn’t respond.

“What’s happening?” Anderson said, unable to take it anymore.

“Even if we told you, you wouldn’t be able to understand,” Sherlock said.

Anderson scoffed lightly and looked away. Lestrade made a bit of a choking sound in his throat, and then again, and then Anderson realized that he was laughing. Which was strange, because insults were beyond common between them, and it wasn’t even a particularly good one at that. But Lestrade was laughing, loud and open and carefree, and he even wiped a finger across the corner of his eye when he thumped a scowling Sherlock on the back.

“Oh, thank God,” Lestrade said. “If you did it to Anderson I think I might actually have to arrest you.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and stared out the window sullenly.

Anderson blinked. “What? Did what?”

“Nothing,” both Sherlock and Lestrade said at the same time.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lestrade said, already turning to leave. He gripped Anderson by the shoulder. “Nice work today, Anderson. See you tomorrow.”

“Uh,” Anderson said. “Okay?”

The door clicked shut behind him. Anderson furrowed his brow for a second, and then pulled out his phone.

_might wanna check up on ur bf he’s acting weird._

He pressed send, quietly huffed out a laugh, and then put his phone back into his pocket. He paused, thinking, for another moment, then shrugged to himself and swivelled his chair back to facing the window, where he watched a man try to feed a duck what looked like a burrito from the park bench across the road.

-+-+-+-

John took the tube home from a grueling shift at work. There was a nasty flu going around, and he’d seen enough snot and tears for a lifetime in the span of a few hours. He pulled out his phone, about to make a reminder to himself to wipe down the doorknobs and counters in the flat with disinfectant. God knew what chemicals and viruses Sherlock’s experiments had put all over every available square inch.

That is to say, he took out his phone, perfectly prepared to do this, except that the moment he turned on his phone, he took one glance at the screen and immediately froze.

He unlocked his phone. He had fourteen new messages from Lestrade, twenty-one new messages from Molly, and one new message from Anderson.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said.

By the time he was walking the short few blocks from the station to their flat, he had unknowingly broken into a speed walk. He made it home in record time.

“Sherlock?” he called out the instant he opened the door to their flat.

Sherlock poked his head through from the kitchen. “Hello, John.”

“Hey,” John said. “So I got a bunch of texts.”

Sherlock’s face paled.

“Any chance I could get an explanation as to why you’ve flirted—and _terribly,_ according to Lestrade—with half of Scotland Yard?”

“Um,” Sherlock said, and then did a visible double-take. “Wait, _terribly?”_

John gawped. “You mean you actually did that? Wait, hang on.” He turned on his phone and scrolled through the plethora of messages. “‘If you were an enzyme, I’d be DNA helices so that I could unzip your genes.’” He looked back up to Sherlock and pulled his best _what the fuck_ face.

Sherlock scowled and ducked his head back, disappearing into the kitchen where he was probably making some fresh new biohazard on their dining table.

John toed off his shoes, hung up his coat, and walked to the kitchen where, as predicted, Sherlock was mixing something that smelled toxic, stirring with their silverware. Mrs. Hudson was going to weep.

“Why did you do that?” John asked.

Sherlock pointedly tapped a fork against a test tube and did not respond.

“Sherlock,” John said, “if you wanted to practice flirting, you could’ve just said so.”

Sherlock’s eyes snapped up. “I don’t need to _practice,”_ he sneered.

“Uh-huh,” John said, and spread his arms. “C’mon, then. Give me your best shot.”

Sherlock was silent for a good minute. Then, he said, “Are you a radioactive substance? Because you’re glowing.” To further deliver his point, he lightly shook the liquid inside the test tube, which sloshed and glowed a faint neon green.

John said, “Yeah, you need to practice.”

Sherlock stopped abusing their silverware and looked up to John, raising an eyebrow. “Are you volunteering?”

John just smiled.

Sherlock blinked, and then something flashed on his face and he scrambled to stand, the silverware falling to the table with a clatter that made John wince.

“Are you—” Sherlock’s voice contained a barely-held tension, thrumming like electricity. “You’re saying that you’re—”

Before he could lose his nerve, John stepped forwards, rose on his tiptoes, and pressed a fleeting kiss to the corner of Sherlock’s mouth. It had dropped open in surprise by the time he pulled back.

“Yeah,” John said.

Sherlock shut his mouth and swallowed. “Yeah?”

John nodded and smirked. “But you really do need to work on your pick-up lines.”

A smile was spreading on Sherlock’s face, molasses-slow. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“It did,” John admitted, and snickered. “But seriously. DNA helices. Are you kidding me?”

A dangerous glint appeared in Sherlock’s eye. He said, “Are you a carbon sample? Because I want to date you.”

John gave Sherlock a deadpan look. “That’s enough practice for today, I think.”

Sherlock said, “You’re so hot, you denature my proteins.”

“Jesus Christ.” John shuddered. “Please stop.”

“Without gravity, I’d still fall for you.”

“Seriously, stop.”

“Make me.”

And John did.

**Author's Note:**

> It's my birthday! Please accept this incredibly self-indulgent and cracky drabble as a gift from me to you.


End file.
